Normality: disability and communicative embodiment in Béla Balázs’s visible man

This essay attends to a deep ambivalence around disability in Béla Balázs’s 1924 book of film theory, Visible Man. I argue that disability, as a rhetorical figure and as a conceptual counterpart to normality, structures Balázs’s thinking about cinema’s anthropological significance in the book’s eponymous introductory chapter. I begin by outlining the chapter’s broader narrative of the decline and rehabilitation of communicative capacities, which I link to modernism’s interest in human transformation via technology. Cracks in this narrative edifice begin to show, however, in Balázs’s rhetorical use of sign language and its association with deafness, which I suggest points to a latent but disavowed affinity between film’s mode of bodily expressivity with a stigmatized, non-normative communicative practice. Balázs’s image of a limbless but fully expressive torso of Venus, which implicitly prefigures visible man’s own expressivity, similarly prompts a reconsideration of normative bodily form. I conclude by suggesting that Balázs’s speculative media anthropology registers and responds to a broader destabilization of normative able-bodiedness in the early twentieth century, driven in part by the explosion of visual media such as film.